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Introduction to CptS 224

Who I am

WSU ’85 (CS, Math), huge Cougar Football fan ….
Boeing, grad school in Arizona, BBN in Boston, WSU 1999-present
Hands-on system builder, does applied research in distributed computing “middleware” and fault tolerance for power grid
Consulted to Amazon.com, Network Associates, TriGeo Network Security, Harris computers, Real-Time Innovations, ...

About the class

Check out the syllabus
Note that many of the topics are indicated as "no book." Lecture attendance is in your best interest, as the textbooks are supplemental to the content of the course, rather than being the bulk of the content. I will try really hard to burn students who cut corners on class attendance.
Notes in the course are from Geoff Allen and myself

History and background of Unix

Note: NONE of this is testable

1969:

Developed at AT&T
00:00:00 Jan 1, 1970 is "time zero" in Unix
An experiment on an old, unused computer (a DEC PDP-7)

“Unix” is a pun on “Multics”

1970:

Ported to a PDP-11/20
C programming language invented by Dennis Ritchie to make it easier

1973:

Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie re-wrote kernel in C

Note: Thomas and Ritchie later received the Turing Award, the “Nobel Prize” of computer science. Those interested in computer security would do very well to read Thompson’s epic article “Reflections on Trusting Trust” from a few decades ago. Based on this kind of trust that Unix started out with, just a few years ago there was a deep DNS cache poisoning vulnerability discovered by Dan Kaminski; see this.

1974:

Source is being distributed to Universities
Since AT&T had trade restrictions due to their telephone monopoly, they couldn't really make money off of Unix
Unix begins gaining a stronghold in Universities (which would eventually lead to Unix's commercial success)

1976:

Version 6

1977:

First version of BSD Unix
Based on AT&T Version 6
Developed by the Computer Systems Research Group at UC Berkeley

1979:

Version 7
Focused on being portable to various architectures
AT&T begins charging for Unix source license

$100 for universities, $21,000 for everyone else

3BSD adds virtual memory

Added TCP/IP networking

1985:

BSD 4.3

1987:

System V, Release 3 (Usually written Vr3 or V.3)

1990:

System V, Release 4

Sun and AT&T. Attempted to combine the best of System V and BSD

Open Software Foundation (OSF) formed

DEC, HP, IBM, and some others

1991:

OSF/1

The OSF's attempt to combine the best of System V and BSD
DEC (now Compaq) is the only vendor who has actually used the OSF/1 system, though HP and IBM both use elements from OSF/1.

Unix sold to X/Open Consortium

1994:

Linux kernel 1.0

1994:

The web takes off, Unix is the primary server platform, demand soars

There's a good article on Unix history at http://www.byte.com/art/9410/sec8/art3.htm and a totally cool Unix history chart at http://perso.wanadoo.fr/levenez/unix/

Unix and Dilbert (November 9, 1993)

Unix Camps

The material for this class should be applicable to any Unix system anywhere on the spectrum. You are free to use whatever you have at your disposal. You should note however, that there are likely to be variations in how commands work, depending on what system you use.

AT&Tish

BSDish

The Unwanted Stepchildren

Before Next Lecture

1. Get a “ssh” (secure shell) terminal program for use in this class. Its to get access to a unix-like system.

If you use a Mac, its simply the Terminal program. You will be using your own computer for the Unix/Linux there. If you want to use an EECS machine (and files there), see below.

If you use Windoze, the best free one is putty or its GUI-based big brother, Tunnelier. Both are available at www.putty.org.

2. Now try to log into the main EECS gateway machine, ssh-server.eecs.wsu.edu. If you can’t, then do NOT email me, but lets discuss it in the next class. You won’t need to use any EECS machines, so if you are a grad student from another department for example you will already have access to Unix/Linux there.